The development of the next Ubuntu LTS release, i.e., Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver, is going on in full swing. The desktop development team has decided to add a new option in the installation process that allows you to perform a lean installation of Ubuntu.

If you’ve spent any time in the Snapcraft forum, it’s quite likely you’ve come across Dan Llewellyn – a keen community advocate or self-proclaimed Snapcrafter. Dan has always had a passion for computing and is completely self-taught. Outside of the community, Dan is a freelance WordPress developer. After getting into the open source world around 1998, he has switched between various Linux distros including Suse, RedHat, Gentoo before settling on Ubuntu from the 5.04 release onwards. A longtime participant in the UK Ubuntu chatroom – where he met Canonical’s Alan Pope – Dan admits he was never that active before Snapcraft came along.

It was spending time in the UK chatroom around 2016 that he discovered snaps which piqued his interest. “I saw the movement of changing Clicks to snaps and thought it was an interesting idea. It’s more widely focused than a mobile app delivery system and I’ve always liked things that also worked on the server, IoT and elsewhere” Dan comments. With a previous desire to get into mobile app development and seeing the move away from Ubuntu Touch, Dan was eager to see Snapcraft succeed and felt like it was something he could contribute to.

"We want to be able to focus our engineering efforts on the things that matter most to our users, and in order to do that we need to get some more data about sort of setups our users have and which software they are running on it," explained Will Cooke, the director of Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical.

To gather that information Cooke proposed adding a checkbox to the Ubuntu installer that says something like "Send diagnostics information to help improve Ubuntu". "This would be checked by default" Cooke wrote.

Canonical announced plans to roll out a user data and diagnostics collection system with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver). This new system will collect data on the user's OS details, hardware setup, apps and OS settings.

"We want to be able to focus our engineering efforts on the things that matter most to our users, and in order to do that we need to get some more data about sort of setups our users have and which software they are running on it," said Will Cooke, Director of Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical.

With great joy we are finally offically announcing the Debian MiniDebConf which will take place in Hamburg (Germany) from May 16 to 20, with three days of Debcamp style hacking, followed by two days of talks, workshops and more hacking. And then, Monday the 21st is also a holiday in Germany, so you might choose to extend your stay by a day! (Though there will not be an official schedule for the 21st.)

I think the lamest part of my current job is that we heavily rely on multifunction printers. We need to print a high volume of complicated documents on demand. You know, 1500 copies of a color booklet printed on 11x17 paper folded in 3 stapled in the middle kind of stuff.

Pardon my French, but printers suck big time. The printer market is an oligopoly clusterfuck and it seems it keeps getting worse (looking at you, Fuji-Xerox merger). None of the drivers support Linux properly, all the printers are big piles of proprietary code and somehow the corporations selling them keep adding features no one needs.

Will Cooke, Canonical's Director of Ubuntu Desktop, has announced plans to collect more diagnostics data from Ubuntu installations. This would involve collecting system hardware/software details during the installation process and be uploaded to Ubuntu servers, but users could opt-out of said survey.

Ubuntu developers are in the process of landing Mesa 18.0 within the "Bionic Beaver" archive for the upcoming 18.04 LTS distribution release. In the process they are also enabling GLVND for allowing the Mesa and NVIDIA proprietary drivers more happily co-exist on the same system.

In addition, the company says that it needs to know your location, yet it promises to not store IP addresses of users. Other information that would be collected includes total installation time, automatic login info, selected disk layout, LivePatch enablement, and if you choose to install updates or third-party software during installation.

Technologic Systems has begun sampling its first i.MX6 UL (UltraLite) based board, which is also its first computer-on-module that can double as an SBC. The 75 x 55mm TS-4100 module features a microSD slot, onboard eMMC, a micro-USB OTG port with power support, and optional WiFi and Bluetooth. Like most Technologic boards, such as the popular, i.MX6-based TS-4900 module, it offers long-term support and -40 to 85°C support, and ships with schematics and open source Linux images (Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian Jesse).

This year we're breaking up our Readers' Choice Awards by category, so check back weekly for a new poll on the site. We started things off with Best Linux Distribution, and nearly 10,000 readers voted. The winner was Debian, with many commenting "As for servers, Debian is still the best" or similar.

One to watch that is rising in the polls is Manjaro, which is independently based on the Arch Linux. Manjaro is a favorite for Linux newcomers and is known for its user-friendliness and accessibility.

The new LoCo Council has been a little lax with updating this blog. It’s admittedly taken us a little bit of time to figure out what exactly we’re doing, but we seem to be on our feet now. I’d like to rectify the blog issue by wrapping up the first three months of our reign in a summary post to get us back on track.

According to the elementary OS developer, the next release of the Ubuntu-based operating system is getting a new versioning scheme, updated kernel and graphics stacks, as well as the latest GTK+ technologies.

We already knew that "Juno" would be the codename of the next major elementary OS release, but it now looks like the version number was changed from 0.5 to 5.0, which, apparently, won't mean anything to regular users.

Following the release of the Linux 4.15 kernel with KPTI and Retpoline introduction, many Phoronix readers were interested in seeing a fresh Linux CPU performance comparison. For those reasons plus in preparing for the Raven Ridge testing, here are benchmarks of 19 different systems when using Ubuntu x86_64 with the Linux 4.15 stable kernel.

An assortment of 19 different systems from old to new and from low-end to high-end were tested, ranging from old AMD A10 Kaveri APUs to the high-end AMD EPYC 7601 server processor, with a similar breadth of CPUs tested on the Intel side. Again, these tests are mostly being done for reference purposes. And in the days ahead will be a larger low-end-focused CPU comparison for the upcoming Ryzen 3 2200G / Ryzen 5 2400G Linux benchmarking.

More in Tux Machines

Linux: To recurse or not

Linux and recursion are on very good speaking terms. In fact, a number of Linux command recurse without ever being asked while others have to be coaxed with just the right option. When is recursion most helpful and how can you use it to make your tasks easier? Let’s run through some useful examples and see.

today's leftovers

MX Linux Review of MX-17. MX-17 is a cooperative venture between the antiX and former MEPIS Linux communities. It’s XFCE based, lightning fast, comes with both 32 and 64-bit CPU support…and the tools. Oh man, the tools available in this distro are both reminders of Mepis past and current tech found in modern distros.

Samsung stopped the distribution of the Android 8.0 Oreo operating system update for its Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones due to unexpected reboots reported by several users.
SamMobile reported the other day that Samsung halted all Android 8.0 Oreo rollouts for its Galaxy S8/S8+ series of Android smartphones after approximately a week since the initial release. But only today Samsung published a statement to inform user why it stopped the rollouts, and the cause appears to be related to a limited number of cases of unexpected reboots after installing the update.

The Xen Project is comprised of a diverse set of member companies and contributors that are committed to the growth and success of the Xen Project Hypervisor. The Xen Project Hypervisor is a staple technology for server and cloud vendors, and is gaining traction in the embedded, security and automotive space. This blog series highlights the companies contributing to the changes and growth being made to the Xen Project and how the Xen Project technology bolsters their business.

A few days back I reported on Intel Icelake patches for the i965 Mesa driver in bringing up the OpenGL support now that several kernel patch series have been published for enabling these "Gen 11" graphics within the Direct Rendering Manager driver. This Icelake support has been quick to materialize even with Cannonlake hardware not yet being available.

Introduced as part of LunarG's recent Vulkan SDK update is the VLF, the Vulkan Layer Factory.
The Vulkan Layer Factory aims to creating Vulkan layers easier by taking care of a lot of the boilerplate code for dealing with the initialization, etc. This framework also provides for "interceptor objects" for overriding functions pre/post API calls for Vulkan entry points of interest.